My BEST and WORST Options Trades
And the BIGGEST lessons I learned from them in 2021
(Part 2 of A Crash Course on How To Properly Trade Options)
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1/ WORST TRADE
March 4, Thursday.
Market been stuck in a 1+ week doldrum.
Some rumblings of sectoral rotation out of tech.
Vaccine rollouts still dubious.
Shipping routes still jammed as hell.
I bought a 40-delta front month put on $SNOW (bellwhether for frothy tech sector)
March 8, Monday.
$SNOW plummets 15% to $213 on practically no news, crossing my price target.
My PnL is +90% and I'm like "WOW I'M A GENIUS! What else is a landmark for frothiness?"
Tesla.
๐ญ
I closed out SNOW & rolled into some front-month at-the-money puts on TSLA.
RIP. ๐ชฆ
2/ Lesson #1: BEWARE OF WHALES
March 9, Tuesday.
$TSLA jumps $560 -> $660 after a 5-day slide.
I'm -$7K from that ONE FUCKING TRADE!
What happened?
- I'd forgotten about Cathie Wood & her tendency to swoop in with ARKK after a multi-day TSLA bloodbath
- I wasn't whale-tracking
3/ LESSON #2: Know what the market has already priced in
Everyone's got that friend ("Joe") & if Joe's talking about It, then It is done.
- When Joe's googling web3, u gotta sell Bitcoin. Like ASAP.
- When Joe's murmuring inflation, the Fed's already hiked rates. Like yesterday.
A trader's biggest fear is that HE IS JOE, the village idiot, the last to know!
I was Joe on my last TSLA trade. The fact that it'd already fallen -33% last month (it was trading ~$850 on Feb 9) meant that most bears had already placed their trades.
I was the last bear. ๐ป๐ญ
So far, none of my lessons are specific to options-trading. That's not a coincidence!
OPTIONS TRADING IS JUST LEVERED STOCK TRADING.
With minor caveats:
- IV
- time value decay
- nonlinear payouts
But at the end of the day everything boils down to expectations investing.
4/ Lesson #3: Understand IV (implied volatility)
Just like stocks can be undervalued/"cheap" or overvalued/"rich", so can options.
When most people learn options for the 1st time & get to the chapter about implied volatility, they come across something like this:
Gross. ๐งฎ
As much as I love g(r)eeking out about math, nonsensical integrals are NOT USEFUL for trading.
A USEFUL and SIMPLE way to think about IV is: a proxy for price.
The higher the IV of a stock, the more expensive all of its options series will be. The lower the IV, the cheaper.
What makes for an expensive (high IV) option?
First, a basic truth:
The more a stock moves the more likely it is to hit any price target above/below current price.
Therefore:
The more a stock moves the more attractive its OTM (out of money) options. Attractive ๐ expensive.
Factors that lead to expensive (high IV) options:
- "meme-ness" (e.g. $GME, $AMC, $TSLA, $ROKU)
meme stocks' prices moves around a lot so their IV is high; a 15% OTM call/put on any of these names will be more expensive than a 15% OTM call/put on a stable name like JNJ
- news
- catalyst events (e.g. earnings)
- moneyness
At-the-money options often have lower IV than OTM options because of the market's ambient fear (people consistently demand lower-strike puts for crash protection, so those get bid up). This leads to a "volatility skew" in equities.
- time to maturity
Longer-dated options (that expire many months out) always have lower IV than near-term options. This is b/c traders trade them less, since they have less info about the far future & thus bet on/ bid up near-term IV.
Graphs below show IV vs time to maturity.
5/ Lesson #4: Know your exit conditions & STICK TO THEM.
This one saved my ass on $SNOW. My thesis had been to play on what George Soros calls the "twilight period" in his model of a boom-bust cycles, albeit on a micro-scale & only for one stock.
I set my PT to -15% and exited.
For more on George Soros's boom-bust cycle and what defines the "twilight period" as well as each of the other periods, read:
6/ Lesson #5: Don't make emotionally-driven trades
Confession: I bought those TSLA puts b/c I WANTED the stock to go down, not because I had strong fundamental reasons why I thought it would drop further.
When traders lack real reasons, they say "ah, I'm playing on sentiment."
7/ BEST TRADE
May 12, Wed.
The market is freaking out about INFLATION!
CPI news had just come out. 4.2%!
Consumer discretionary sector slid -3.3% in 1 day.
I wrote an analysis on inflation (below) & at the same time bought some Dec 17 Costco ATM calls.
$COST is now up >50% since early May.
They're crushing it b/c COVID:
- people stuck @ home gotta buy staple goods in bulk
- deliveries worldwide all jammed up
- inflation means $COST raises prices across the board
I set my PT at +30% ($480) then bought $370-strike calls at $23.2
Summer comes & passes.
Thanksgiving comes & passes.
The stock starts rising steadily, easily crosses my 480 PT, while my calls shoot up 100%, then 200%, 300%...
I was so tempted to take profit.
But I was sure $COST would crush Q1 '22 earnings.
So I revised PT up to $530. HODL.
Dec 9, Thurs.
COST reports Q1 '22 earnings.
Total revenues rose 16.5% YoY to $50.3B, beating consensus. Membership fee revenues rose 9.9% YoY.
Stock surges from $520 to $555.
I sold my puts to close at $175 for a +750% gain.
8/ Lesson #6: Know your exit conditions, but also ADAPT THEM WITH NEW INFORMATION
My quant friends tend to "not play catalysts, but instead play their after-effects." This is cuz there's way more data after vs before a major event. And their edge is adapting quickly to new data.
End/
These are the top lessons I learned making my best and worst options trades in 2021.
Stay tuned for more ๐งตs on COMMONLY MISUNDERSTOOD principles of options trading like:
- how to (properly) think about Greeks
- how to mind-read market consensus based on options chain data
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Nvidia is about to become the 1st trillion-dollar chipmaker, after surging $200B in valuation in a single day.
But when cofounders Jensen, Chris, & Curtis started the company in 1993, they had only $40K in the bank.
Hereโs Nvidiaโs founding story, from 0 to Taxman of AI.
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1/ On Day 0
The idea came together over breakfast at Dennys โ to bring 3D graphics computing to the burgeoning video game industry.
The risk was clearโ$10M+ initial capex needed to ship the first accelerator with no pre-committed customers, no funding, and huge technology &โฆ twitter.com/i/web/status/1โฆ
2/ Cofounders take action
So Jensen quit his director job at chipmaker LSI Logic (now Broadcom). And Chris and Curtis quit their engineering jobs at Sun Microsystems.
Nvidia initially had no name and the co-founders named all their files NV for โnext version.โ When the foundersโฆ twitter.com/i/web/status/1โฆ
(with real examples, each scored #/10 on usefulness & accuracy)
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1/ Sourcing potential clients
score: 9/10
Prompt:
"Find 50 [insert business, eg. brokers] in [target region] that [do X, eg. offer US stocks on their investment app]?
Indicate each's website, HQ, & [other relevant info: eg. their custodial partner]. Put everything into a chart.
2/ Forming Google Dork queries to refine souring
score: 9/10
If your clients are also clients of X & if you know what terms are in a standard partnership agreement, you can Google DORK to source many more "hidden" candidate clients that have no publicly announced partnerships!
BREAKING:
Another wrinkle in the regional banks / $SIVB / $SBNY saga.
Retail investors about to lose $๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐ ๐๐๐๐๐โ $130M on SVB + $180M on SBNY.
But NO ONE is talking about it.
WSB mods are even censoring posts about it.
Whatโs going on?
๐
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1/ The News
On 3/14, National Securities Clearing Corp (NSCC) said it will no longer accept $SIVB & $SBNY exercise. Settlements will be be broker-by-broker.
What does this mean?
In short, things are about to get fucked.
Put holders are about to get WIPED.
Let me explain ...
2/ Expectation vs Reality
Normally if u buy a put and stock --> $0, u should make a BOATLOAD of $$! Right?
Wrong
Not this time
Not on $SIVB
Why?
u can only cash in gains via 2 ways:
a) sell
b) exercise
For SVB puts, depending on ur broker, u might not be allowed to do either!